Pop Quiz
by Unstoppable Cyborg
Summary: Katie decides to give the paladins a day off by running them through a pet program she's been working on for a couple months now. They aren't appreciative. Takes place several months prior to my fic With the Distance Amplified. Rated for allusions to canon-typical violence.


**A/N: Crossposting this from tumblr. In this fic, Katie is 22, Matt 18, Lance is** ** _almost_** **18, Hunk 17, and Shiro 14 (or 3.5 depending on whom you ask). Also, Katie is the Black Paladin, Matt Green, and Shiro Red.**

 **I do not own _Voltron Legendary Defender_ , and the original creator of this au is sabertoothwalrus of tumblr.**

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When the paladins walked into the training room, Katie picked up a set of data pads, both the tablet-like ones as well as the cell-phone-like ones. She then passed out one of of each to the other paladins before setting up semi transparent walls between them.

"So I thought that, since we had a pretty tough battle yesterday, we have a pretty good opportunity to start this. Well, you guys can start. I'm going to be going over the data we got from that warship." She pulled up a tab from the gauntlet of her suit and sat down. The others looked at each other before following suit.

"That's weird, I didn't know there was a calculator function on these," Shiro said as he turned on the smaller of the devices.

Matt rolled his eyes. "I doubt Altean calculators would look like Texas Instruments, and there's no way they'd use Arabic numerals. Hunk, you write this?"

Hunk was shaking his head as Lanced squawked in indignation before glaring at Katie. "Really? Math problems? That's your idea of a break? I thought we'd be playing video games or bonding with the lions or something!"

"You can play video games on your own time." She looked up from the screen, a dark smile momentarily gracing her features. "Would you rather be doing curl-ups?"

"No, this is fine," Matt said as he shot a glare at Lance through the frosted walls. "Totally fine. A bit simplistic, though. All of us have already taken Algebra I."

"Why do we have to do this?" Shiro asked. "Um, so Allura doesn't yell at us. Not that we want curl-ups or anything."

"Math is a use it or lose it type of skill," she said. "Besides, you might want to get used to the calculator. Not all of the parts will use it; its already been synced so you won't need to worry about accidentally giving a calculator answer on a no-calculator problem, and if you do it's not your fault it just means that the entanglement isn't working properly…"

"What about you, since it's a use it or lose it skill?" Matt interjected to spare everyone the tangent on quantum physics.

She blinked and shrank down slightly, remembering that she was supposed to be their wise leader. She felt like she was forgetting that too often. "I wrote the test. And I'll be grading your work." She opened a third tab to track their progress before going back to analyzing the data.

As Shiro reached the end of the Geometry section, he looked up. "You know, Allura probably won't-"

"You're not geting out of this that easily," Katie said as she scrolled through the mostly-true Pre-Algebra problems. Hunk was the only one who hadn't made the mistake of "three squared equals six" or anything along that vein of so-called reasoning. Well, at least it proved her points to Allura about why this was a good idea. "I've already talked to her, and she approves as long as we don't spend too much time on it."

"It's been half an hour," Hunk said as he wrote down the sine of five pi over four. "I don't mind math, but how much longer is this?"

"I left off at third semester Calculus," she said, narrowing her eyes at the screens in front of her.

"I doubt the Galra will make us do math," Lance grumbled.

Katie minimized her tabs. "It's not about the numbers. Math teaches you to analyze systems for patterns, and given all the Robeasts the Galra throw at us we need to be able to analyze them for weaknesses as quickly as possible. _That's_ why Allura allowed me to give you this training session, and that's why we'll be working on your math skills in the future. But don't worry, definitely by tomorrow we'll be back to our usual schedule of trying to not get beat up by swarms of gladiators." She reopened her tabs with a frustrated wave of her hand.

It took several minutes for the tense silence to break. "Sorry for snapping," Katie said. "Analysis was the main reason for this going forward with this, and the reason I gave Allura, but my original reason for doing this was. Well, if you want to be defenders of the universe for the rest of your lives that's cool, but if you want an Earth job there's a good chance you'll need some sort of college degree, and since none of you finished school that means entrance exams, and I heard the remedial math classes suck."

There were no more complaints about having to do math until the paladins got their scores back.


End file.
